In St. Domingo, national independence is intact. There are no missionaries exercising absolute, though concealed, control, no foreign ministry governing in the European spirit; everything is left to the genius and inspiration of the population. In the Spanish part of the island, this population consists of mulattoes. I shall not speak of them. They seem to imitate, in some fashion, the simplest and easiest features of our civilization. Like all half-breeds, they have a tendency to assimilate with that branch of their genealogy which does them most honor. They are, therefore, capable of practising, in some degree, our usages. The absolute question of the capacity of races cannot be studied among them. Let us cross the mountain ridge which separates the republic of Dominica from the empire of Hayti. There we find institutions not only similar to ours, but founded upon the most recent maxims of our political wisdom. All that, since sixty years, the voice of the most refined liberalism has proclaimed in the deliberative assemblies of Europe, all that the most zealous friends of the freedom and dignity of man have written, all the declarations of rights and principles, have found an echo on the banks of Artibonite. No trace of Africa remains in the _written_ laws, or the _official_ language; the recollections of the land of Ham are _officially_ expunged from every mind; once more, the institutions are completely European. Let us now examine how they harmonize with the manners. What a contrast! The manners are as depraved, as beastly, as ferocious as in Dahomey[70] or the country of the Fellatahs. The same barbarous love of ornament, combined with the same indifference to form; beauty consists in color, and provided a garment is of gaudy red, and adorned with imitation gold, taste is little concerned with useless attention to materials or fitness; and as for cleanliness, this is a superfluity for which no one cares. You desire an audience with some high functionary: you are ushered into the presence of an athletic negro, stretched on a wooden bench, his head wrapped in a dirty, tattered handkerchief, and surmounted by a three-cornered hat, profusely decorated with gold. The general apparel consists of an embroidered coat (without suitable nether-garments), a huge sword, and slippers. You converse with this mass of flesh, and are anxious to discover what ideas can occupy a mind under so unpromising an exterior. You find an intellect of the lowest order combined with the most savage pride, which can be equalled only by as profound and incurable a laziness. If the individual before you opens his mouth, he will retail all the hackneyed common-places that the papers have wearied you with for the last half century. This barbarian knows them by heart; he has very different interests, different instincts; he has no ideas of his own. He will talk like Baron Holbach, reason like Grimm, and at the bottom has no serious care except chewing